Tag Archives: curlup

curl up 2019 will happen in Prague

The curl project is happy to invite you to the city of Prague, the Czech Republic, where curl up 2019 will take place.

curl up is our annual curl developers conference where we gather and talk Internet protocols, curl’s past, current situation and how to design its future. A weekend of curl.

Previous years we’ve gathered twenty-something people for an intimate meetup in a very friendly atmosphere. The way we like it!

In a spirit to move the meeting around to give different people easier travel, we have settled on the city of Prague for 2019, and we’ll be there March 29-31.

Sign up now!

Symposium on the Future of HTTP

This year, we’re starting off the Friday afternoon with a Symposium dedicated to “the future of HTTP” which is aimed to be less about curl and more about where HTTP is and where it will go next. Suitable for a slightly wider audience than just curl fans.

That’s Friday the 29th of March, 2019.

Program and talks

We are open for registrations and we would love to hear what you would like to come and present for us – on the topics of HTTP, of curl or related matters. I’m sure I will present something too, but it becomes a much better and more fun event if we distribute the talking as much as possible.

The final program for these days is not likely to get set until much later and rather close in time to the actual event.

The curl up 2019 wiki page is where you’ll find more specific details appear over time. Just go back there and see.

Helping out and planning?

If you want to follow the planning, help out, offer improvements or you have questions on any of this? Then join the curl-meet mailing list, which is dedicated for this!

Free or charge thanks to sponsors

We’re happy to call our event free, or “almost free” of charge and we can do this only due to the greatness and generosity of our awesome sponsors. This year we say thanks to Mullvad, Sticker Mule, Apiary and Charles University.

There’s still a chance for your company to help out too! Just get in touch.

curl up 2019 with logos

curl up 2018 summary

curl up 2018

The event that occurred this past weekend was the second time we gathered a bunch of curl enthusiasts and developers in the same physical room to discuss the past, the present and the future from a curl perspective.

Stockholm, Sweden, was the center of gravity this time when Goto 10 hosted our merry collective. Spring has finally arrived here and as the sun was out a lot, it made it a lovely weekend weather wise too. As a bonus, the little coffee shop on the premises was open all through both days. Just for us!

This time we were 22 peeps coming in from Sweden, Germany, UK, Spain, the US, and Czechia.

This is what it looked like (photos by me):

Talks

We had a bunch of presentations over the two days, done by a bunch of people. I recorded the screens and recorded the voice on most of them, and they’re available online. (Apologies for only recording a part of the screen for many of them!)

The talks were around how things work in curl or in the curl project, how people have used curl and a bit about upcoming technologies that we hope to get curl to support (soon?): QUIC, DOH, Alt-Svc, tests, CI, proxies, libcurl in Apache, using curl on a CDN, fuzzing curl, parsing email with curl etc.

Quiz

We rounded off the Saturday with a twelve question curl quiz. The winner, Fernando, managed to hit the right answer in 8 questions and did it faster than the competition. He got himself a signed copy of Everything curl the second print edition as a prize!

Sponsors

46 Elks was graciously sponsoring us with awesome food and t-shirts.

Sticker Mule provided us with stickers.

Goto 10 let us occupy their place during the weekend when it is otherwise closed!

This event was possible only thanks to their help!

2019

Several people asked me about next year already. I certainly hope we can run another curl up in 2019, but I don’t know yet where this should happen. Ideally, I would like to move it around to different countries to give different people the ability to show up easier, but I also value having a local “host” that can provide the room and facilities for us. I’ll send out probing questions about the 2019 location later this year. If you have a usable office or another suitable place that could host us, (preferably outside of Germany or Sweden), feel most welcome and encouraged to contact me!

(me, photographed by Christian Schmitz)

Time’s up to shut up and sign up for curl up

We have just opened up the registration site for curl up 2018, the annual curl developers meeting that this year takes place in Stockholm, Sweden, over the weekend April 14-15. There’s a limited number of seats available, so if you want to join in the fun it might be a good idea to decide early on.

Sign up!

Also, to get into the proper curl up spirit, here’s the curl quiz we ran last year. I hope to run something similar again this year, but of course with a different set of questions.

The curl year 2017

I’m about to take an extended vacation for the rest of the year and into the beginning of the next, so I decided I’d sum up the year from a curl angle already now, a few weeks early. (So some numbers will grow a bit more after this post.)

2017

So what did we do this year in the project, how did curl change?

The first curl release of the year was version 7.53.0 and the last one was 7.57.0. In the separate blog posts on 7.55.0, 7.56.0 and 7.57.0 you’ll note that we kept up adding new goodies and useful features. We produced a total of 9 releases containing 683 bug fixes. We announced twelve security problems. (Down from 24 last year.)

At least 125 different authors wrote code that was merged into curl this year, in the 1500 commits that were made. We never had this many different authors during a single year before in the project’s entire life time! (The 114 authors during 2016 was the previous all-time high.)

We added more than 160 new names to the THANKS document for their help in improving curl. The total amount of contributors is now over 1660.

This year we truly started to use travis for CI builds and grew from a mere two builds per commit and PR up to nineteen (with additional ones run on appveyor and elsewhere). The current build set is a very good verification that that most things still compile and work after a PR is merged. (see also the testing curl article).

Mozilla announced that they too will use colon-slash-slash in their logo. Of course we all know who had it that in their logo first… =)

 

In March 2017, we had our first ever curl get-together as we arranged curl up 2017 a weekend in Nuremberg, Germany. It was very inspiring and meeting parts of the team in real life was truly a blast. This was so good we intend to do it again: curl up 2018 will happen.

curl turned 19 years old in March. In May it surpassed 5,000 stars on github.

Also in May, we moved over the official curl site (and my personal site) to get hosted by Fastly. We were beginning to get problems to handle the bandwidth and load, and in one single step all our worries were graciously taken care of!

We got curl entered into the OSS-fuzz project, and Max Dymond even got a reward from Google for his curl-fuzzing integration work and thanks to that project throwing heaps of junk at libcurl’s APIs we’ve found and fixed many issues.

The source code (for the tool and library only) is now at about 143,378 lines of code. It grew around 7,057 lines during the year. The primary reasons for the code growth were:

  1. the new libssh-powered SSH backend (not yet released)
  2. the new mime API (in 7.56.0) and
  3. the new multi-SSL backend support (also in 7.56.0).

Your maintainer’s view

Oh what an eventful year it has been for me personally.

The first interim meeting for QUIC took place in Japan, and I participated from remote. After all, I’m all set on having curl support QUIC and I’ll keep track of where the protocol is going! I’ve participated in more interim meetings after that, all from remote so far.

I talked curl on the main track at FOSDEM in early February (and about HTTP/2 in the Mozilla devroom). I’ve then followed that up and have also had the pleasure to talk in front of audiences in Stockholm, Budapest, Jönköping and Prague through-out the year.

 

I went to London and “represented curl” in the third edition of the HTTP workshop, where HTTP protocol details were discussed and disassembled, and new plans for the future of HTTP were laid out.

 

In late June I meant to go to San Francisco to a Mozilla “all hands” conference but instead I was denied to board the flight. That event got a crazy amount of attention and I received massive amounts of love from new and old friends. I have not yet tried to enter the US again, but my plan is to try again in 2018…

I wrote and published my h2c tool, meant to help developers convert a set of HTTP headers into a working curl command line.

The single occasion that overshadows all other events and happenings for me this year by far, was without doubt when I was awarded the Polhem Prize and got a gold medal medal from no other than his majesty the King of Sweden himself. For all my work and years spent on curl no less.

Not really curl related, but in November I was also glad to be part of the huge Firefox Quantum release. The biggest Firefox release ever, and one that has been received really well.

I’ve managed to commit over 800 changes to curl through the year, which is 54% of the totals and more commits than I’ve done in curl during a single year since 2005 (in which I did 855 commits). I explain this increase mostly on inspiration from curl up and the prize, but I think it also happened thanks to excellent feedback and motivation brought by my fellow curl hackers.

We’re running towards the end of 2017 with me being the individual who did most commits in curl every single month for the last 28 months.

2018?

More things to come!

curl up in Stockholm 2018

Welcome all curl hackers and fans to Stockholm 2018! We are hosting the curl up developers conference April 14-15 2018 in my home city in what now might really become an annual tradition. Remember Nuremberg 2017?

All details are collected and updated on the curl up 2018 wiki page:

curl-up-2018

curl up 2018  will be another two full days event over a weekend and we will make an effort to keep the attendance fee at a minimum.

Presentations by core curl contributors on how things work, what we’ve done lately, what we’re working on how, what we should work on in the future and blue-sky visions about what curl should become when it grows up. Everyone attending are encouraged to present something. All this, mixed with lots of discussions, Q&As and socializing.

This time, I hope you will also have the chance to arrive early and spend the Friday, or a part of it, working hands-on with other curl developers on actual programming/debugging curl features or bugs. The curl-hacking-Friday? While not firmly organized yet, I’d like to see this become reality. Let me know if that’s something you’d be interested to participate on.

Who should come?

Anyone interested in curl, curl development or how to best use curl in application or solutions. Here’s your chance to learn a lot and an excellent opportunity to influence the future of curl. And to get some short glimpses of a spring-time Stockholm when going back and forth to the curl up venue!

Sign up?

We will open up the “ticket booth” in January/February 2018, so just keep your eyes and ears open and you won’t miss it! The general idea is to keep the fee at a minimum, ideally zero. Currently the exact price depends on how we manage to cover the remaining costs with friendly sponsors.

Sponsor us!

We are looking for sponsors. If your company is interested and willing to help us out, in any capacity, please contact me! Remember that our project has no funds of its own and we have no particular company backing.

Where in Stockholm exactly?

We will spend the curl up 2018 weekend at Goto 10, which is near both the Skanstull and Gullmarsplan subway stations.

Action photo from curl up 2017 when Kamil Dudka spoke about Redhat’s use of curl built with NSS.

curlup 2017: curl now

At curlup 2017 in Nuremberg, I did a keynote and talked a little about the road to what we are and where we are right now in the curl project. There will hopefully be a recording of this presentation made available soon, but I wanted to entertain you all by also presenting some of the graphs from that presentation in a blog format for easy access and to share the information.

Some stats and numbers from the curl project early 2017. Unless otherwise mentioned, this is based on the availability of data that we have. The git repository has data from December 1999 and we have detailed release information since version 6.0 (September 13, 1999).

Web traffic

First out, web site traffic to curl.haxx.se over the seven last full years that I have stats for. The switch to a HTTPS-only site happened in February 2016. The main explanation to the decrease in spent bandwidth in 2016 is us removing the HTML and PDF versions of all documentation from the release tarballs (October 2016).

My log analyze software also tries to identify “human” traffic so this graph should not include the very large amount of bots and automation that hits our site. In total we serve almost twice the amount of data to “bots” than to human. A large share of those download the cacert.pem file we host.

Since our switch to HTTPS we have a 301 redirect from the HTTP site, and we still suffer from a large number of user-agents hitting us over and over without seemingly following said redirect…

Number of lines in git

Since we also have documentation and related things this isn’t only lines of code. Plain and simply: lines added to files that we have in git, and how the number have increased over time.

There’s one notable dip and one climb and I think they both are related to how we have rearranged documentation and documentation formatting.

Top-4 author’s share

This could also talk about how seriously we suffer from “the bus factor” in this project. Look at how large share of all commits that the top-4 commiters have authored. Not committed; authored. Of course we didn’t have proper separation between authors and committers before git (March 2010).

Interesting to note here is also that the author listed second here is Yang Tse, who hasn’t authored anything since August 2013. Me personally seem to have plateaued at around 57% of all commits during the recent year or two and the top-4 share is slowly decreasing but is still over 80% of the commits.

I hope we can get the top-4 share well below 80% if I rerun this script next year!

Number of authors over time

In comparison to the above graph, I did one that simply counted the total number of unique authors that have contributed a change to git and look at how that number changes over time.

The time before git is, again, somewhat of a lie since we didn’t keep track of authors vs committers properly then so we shouldn’t put too much value into that significant knee we can see on the graph.

To me, the main take away is that in spite of the top-4 graph above, this authors-over-time line is interestingly linear and shows that the vast majority of people who contribute patches only send in one or maybe a couple of changes and then never appear again in the project.

My hope is that this line will continue to climb over the coming years.

Commits per release

We started doing proper git tags for release for curl 6.5. So how many commits have we done between releases ever since? It seems to have gone up and down over time and I added an average number line in this graph which is at about 150 commits per release (and remember that we attempt to do them every 8 weeks since a few years back).

Towards the right we can see the last 20 releases or so showing a pattern of high bar, low bar, and I’ll get to that more in a coming graph.

Of course, counting commits is a rough measurement as they can be big or small, easy or hard, good or bad and this only counts them.

Commits per day

As the release frequency has varied a bit over time I figured I should just check and see how many commits we do in the project per day and see how that has changed (or not) over time. Remember, we are increasing the number of unique authors fairly fast but the top-4 share of “authorship” is fairly stable.

Turns our the number of commits per day has gone up and down a little bit through the git history but I can’t spot any obvious trend here. In recent years we seem to keep up more than 2 commits per day and during intense periods up to 8.

Days per release

Our general plan is since bunch of years back to do releases every 8 weeks like a clock work. 8 weeks is 56 days.

When we run into serious problems, like bugs that are really annoying or tedious to users or if we get a really serious security problem reported, we sometimes decide to go outside of the regular release schedule and ship something before the end of the 8-week cycle.

This graph clearly shows that over the last, say 20, releases we clearly have felt ourselves “forced” to do follow-up releases outside of the regular schedule. The right end of the graph shows a very clear saw-tooth look that proves this.

We’ve also discussed this slightly on the mailing list recently, and I’m certainly willing to go back and listen to people as to what we can do to improve this situation.

Bugfixes per release

We keep close track of all bugfixes done in git and mark them up and mention them in the RELEASE-NOTES document that we ship in every new release.

This makes it possible for us to go back and see how many bug fixes we’ve recorded for each release since curl 6.5. This shows a clear growth over time. It’s interesting since we don’t see this when we count commits, so it may just be attributed to having gotten better at recording the bugs in the files. Or that we now spend fewer commits per bug fix. Hard to tell exactly, but I do enjoy that we fix a lot of bugs…

Days spent per bugfix

Another way to see the data above is to count the number of bug fixes we do over time and just see how many days we need on average to fix bugs.

The last few years we do more bug fixes than there are days so if we keep up the trend this shows for 2017 we might be able to reach down to 0.5 days per bug fix on average. That’d be cool!

Coverity scans

We run coverity scans on the curl cover regularly and this service keeps a little graph for us showing the number of found defects over time. These days we have a policy of never allowing a defect detected by Coverity to linger around. We fix them all and we should have zero detected defects at all times.

The second graph here shows a comparison line with “other projects of comparable size”, indicating that we’re at least not doing badly here.

Vulnerability reports

So in spite of our grand intentions and track record shown above, people keep finding security problems in curl in a higher frequency than every before.

Out of the 24 vulnerabilities reported to the curl project in 2016, 7 was the result of the special security audit that we explicitly asked for, but even if we hadn’t asked for that and they would’ve remained unknown, 17 would still have stood out in this graph.

I do however think that finding – and reporting – security problem is generally more good than bad. The problems these reports have found have generally been around for many years already so this is not a sign of us getting more sloppy in recent years, I take it as a sign that people look for these problems better and report them more often, than before. The industry as a whole looks on security problems and the importance of them differently now than it did years ago.

curl up 2017, the venue

The fist ever physical curl meeting took place this last weekend before curl’s 19th birthday. Today curl turns nineteen years old.

After much work behind the scenes to set this up and arrange everything (and thanks to our awesome sponsors to contributed to this), over twenty eager curl hackers and friends from a handful of countries gathered in a somewhat rough-looking building at curl://up 2017 in Nuremberg, March 18-19 2017.

The venue was in this old factory-like facility but we put up some fancy signs so that people would find it:

Yes, continue around the corner and you’ll find the entrance door for us:

I know, who’d guessed that we would’ve splashed out on this fancy conference center, right? This is the entrance door. Enter and look for the next sign.

Yes, move in here through this door to the right.

And now, up these stairs…

When you’ve come that far, this is basically the view you could experience (before anyone entered the room):

And when Igor Chubin presents about wttr,in and using curl to do console based applications, it looked like this:

It may sound a bit lame to you, but I doubt this would’ve happened at all and it certainly would’ve been less good without our great sponsors who helped us by chipping in what we didn’t want to charge our visitors.

Thank you very much Kippdata, Ergon, Sevenval and Haxx for backing us!

curl up in Nuremberg!

I’m very happy to announce that the curl project is about to run our first ever curl meeting and developers conference.

March 18-19, Nuremberg Germany

Everyone interested in curl, libcurl and related matters is invited to participate. We only ask of you to register and pay the small fee. The fee will be used for food and more at the event.

You’ll find the full and detailed description of the event and the specific location in the curl wiki.

The agenda for the weekend is purposely kept loose to allow for flexibility and unconference-style adding things and topics while there. You will thus have the chance to present what you like and affect what others present. Do tell us what you’d like to talk about or hear others talk about! The sign-up for the event isn’t open yet, as we first need to work out some more details.

We have a dedicated mailing list for discussing the meeting, called curl-meet, so please consider yourself invited to join in there as well!

Thanks a lot to SUSE for hosting!

Feel free to help us make a cool logo for the event!

good_curl_logo

(The 19th birthday of curl is suitably enough the day after, on March 20.)